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📩 In Today’s Email

• Deep Dive: Why I left Hollywood—and how solo filmmaking brought me back

• Read: Creativity, Inc. — Pixar’s blueprint for fearless storytelling

• Stream: The Studio — power, ego, and who really runs the show

INT. MEDELLÍN – CAFÉ PERGAMINO – MORNING

Steam rises from a yellow, blue, and red striped enamel mug. A hummingbird lands briefly on the edge of the balcony before disappearing. The air is thick with roasted coffee beans, language switches, and new beginnings.

EDWARD (V.O.)

They say when you disappear in Hollywood, no one comes looking. Unless you’re famous. Or dead.

We find him—laptop open, shirt half-buttoned, a face weathered by reinvention. He’s not trying to be seen. Which is why people notice.

BARISTA (COLOMBIAN, 20s)

¿Lo mismo de siempre?

EDWARD

(Smiles)

Sí. Y agua con gas.

She walks off. Edward stares at the blinking cursor. A beat.

EDWARD (V.O.)

I didn’t leave for peace. I left for pressure.

The kind that comes from betting everything on becoming someone new.

A NOTIFICATION pings. Substack subscriber #27.

EDWARD (V.O.)

Slow growth. But real. Like a jungle root. Down before up.

He glances at a group of CRYPTO BROS bros talking funnel metrics. Shakes his head. Then types:

EDWARD (typing)

Scene 2. A café in Medellín. He’s not sure if he’s writing his story, or being written by it.

He stops. Deletes that line. Sits back.

CUT TO:

EXT. LUSH RIVER PATH – DAY (FLASHFORWARD)

Sunlight through eucalyptus. A man walks alone, voice in his head louder than any podcast.

EDWARD (V.O.)

If I’m going to burn the script, I might as well film it.

FADE OUT:

🤿 The Deep Dive

Nomadwood: The New Studio System Is You

I used to make films in Hollywood—real ones.

Cranes and drones overhead, craft services and grocery store sushi, crews running on caffeine, fumes, and the desperate hope that this shot, this story, might mean it all.

I watched actors spin gold under the soft glow of KINO lights.

Magic.

We had DPs, ADs, PAs—every two-letter combo in the alphabet. Directors in sunglasses long past sunset. Agents pacing, publicists posturing.

Air-conditioned trailers and walkie-talkies clipped to belts like weapons. The walkies made it all feel urgent, militant, important.

I sure miss those walkies. They lend the illusion of momentum.

There were parties, of course. Festivals. Glitz. Glammer. Rosé at Cannes, IPAs at Sundance, and New York publicists turning red carpets into tactical zones. Stand here, look there, collar fixed, answer them…

On the Boulevard, I leapt over Vicente Fernández’s star to get to my office.

It felt like the movies still lived in the buildings. That if you climbed high enough—if you got the right meeting, the right nod—you could touch something eternal.

And then, I left.

Not in some Butch Cassidy blaze of glory.

More like a slow fade-out. Like someone slipping out of their own premiere before the credits roll.

I got tired of waiting. Waiting on greenlights. On schedules. On rewrites. On the sun to do its one job and rise on time.

I got tired of watching ideas age out of relevance before they ever left the page. Scripts stacked up like orphans too old to be cute enough to be adopted.

We say filmmaking is all “hurry up and wait.”

So I left the genre. Wrote a new one: just hurry up.

For two years, I didn’t write a word. Didn’t touch a camera. Didn’t even watch a movie. Not a single one. Burnout sounds dramatic, but it felt quieter than that. More like… eroded.

The slow wearing away of instinct. The fire didn’t die—it just forgot why it burned.

But Hollywood loves a comeback.

One afternoon, I started organizing my photos. You know, that thing you do once every five years when your phone starts screaming about storage.

I was just cleaning house. But as I scrolled, I realized I’d accidentally shot some good stuff—moments I’d lived through but barely noticed at the time.

Some… dare I say… footage.

So for fun, I stitched a few things together. Nothing fancy. A timelapse here, a skyline there. A metro station kiss, a mango sliced fast and clean. Just fragments. But suddenly, it felt like something. A rhythm emerged. A pulse.

Down here, in the jungle-breath hills above Medellín.

The stories are just as strange. And the set design? No one builds a backdrop like Colombia. Just watch Romancing the Stone.

Uh oh.

It was fun.

Uh oh.

Here we go again.

Like when you’ve sworn off love, and then one quiet night, it sneaks up behind you. No warning. No plan. And all you can say is, dammit, as you get swept away, completely beyond your control.

That old spark? Roaring back.

I started filming everything.

Narrating like the city itself was whispering lines right after midnight.

Suddenly I needed new hard drives. A new computer.

I didn’t need a giant movie studio.

I became one.

Hollywood taught me craft.

Nomadwood taught me urgency.

These days, I carry a full studio in my backpack:

• Camera: iPhone or GoPro

• Mic: Pocket-sized, wireless

• Lighting: If the sun’s out, you’re golden. If not, shadows tell their own truth. A bounce can be all you need.

• Editor: Me, in a café. Colombian brew. Headphones. Sometimes a pastry if it’s an emotional scene.

This is guerrilla filmmaking. Not a pitch deck in sight. No gatekeepers. No approval emails. Just story, captured in real time, before it forgets it existed.

You don’t need a million-dollar slate or a crew list. You need a lens. A voice. And a place worth remembering.

And if you’re living the nomad life, you already have a three-act structure: You left, you changed, and you’re still becoming. Film the rituals. Film the chaos. Film the midnight doubt and the 6 a.m. light.

Film the airport mirrors when you don’t recognize your own face.

Film the cheap meals and the expensive lessons.

Upload, upload, upload.

You know how every student film starts with an alarm clock going off?

Screw it. Start there. Film that stupid clock. Just start. Because what you’re really filming—every time—is you.

Technology didn’t just change the tools. It changed the gate. It cracked it wide open. We slipped through, cameras in hand, into a new world. Just like Lucy stepped through the wardrobe. Just like Dorothy landed in Technicolor.

Now the studio is your backpack. The classroom is YouTube. The mentor is some 24-year-old on Skillshare who figured out transitions before breakfast. And the distribution? It’s global. Instant. Alive.

You don’t need permission anymore. You need curiosity. Consistency. Wi-Fi.

In 2024, the global creator economy passed $250 billion.

By 2027, it’s projected to hit $480 billion.

And every day, over 3.7 million videos are uploaded to YouTube.

Hollywood’s not dead—it’s just not the only show in town.

I do still miss the walkies, though. Oh well. Small prices.

🎬

Welcome to Nomadwood.

Where the only greenlight you need… is in your pocket.

🤓 The Read

Creativity, Inc. — The Blueprint of Brilliance

It’s perfect. Because Creativity, Inc. isn’t a passive read. It’s a verb disguised as a book—a guide for anyone building something risky, beautiful, or strange. It’s the closest thing I’ve found to a blueprint for creating a studio where originality isn’t just possible—it’s protected.

And none of it exists without Steve Jobs, who didn’t just fund Pixar—he shaped it. From designing the building layout to negotiating brutal deals, Jobs was part philosopher, part bulldozer. But always clear: make insanely great things, or don’t bother.

What Makes This Book Different

Written by Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull, this is less a business book and more a creative leadership journal. Catmull doesn’t pretend to have all the answers. He shares mistakes, doubts, and the internal rewiring required to lead artists without smothering their spark.

His core belief: creativity is fragile. It needs space to fail, time to grow, and protection from the corporate impulse to polish too early. He calls early ideas “ugly babies”—not insults, but reminders that beauty comes after chaos, not before.

The best part? He doesn’t talk theory. He shows how Pixar actually lives these principles. That’s what makes this book so rare.

Pixar: A Working Studio

Pixar’s campus was engineered—literally—to spark collaboration. Jobs insisted the bathrooms be central so people would bump into each other. Cubicles are tiki huts, castles, dollhouses with chandeliers. Animators are encouraged to design their space like a set. The result is organized madness with a singular purpose: creative collisions.

But Pixar’s biggest innovation wasn’t architectural. It was cultural. The Braintrust, their sacred feedback system, gives everyone a voice—but zero authority. No one’s forced to follow notes. The process forces trust. No power games. No egos. Just clarity and candor in service of story.

The Films, The Fails, The Process

• Toy Story 2 was accidentally deleted and saved by a rogue backup file brought in like an Egyptian artifact.

• WALL-E was first called Trash Planet.

• Up was originally about two spoiled young princes who hated each other in a floating castle—until that now-iconic montage reframed the entire film with one perfect emotional punch.

None of it was easy. And that’s the point. As Catmull says, “You can’t be creative without taking risks.” Every film was broken at some point. Every story needed to be torn down, rebuilt, and risked again. Even Finding Nemo nearly drowned.

My favorite remains WALL-E. Almost wordless. Deeply human. A robot on a dead planet showing more feeling than half the award-season darlings. It works because they refused to play it safe.

Lessons for Nomad Creators

This isn’t just about animation. It’s about how to build something meaningful without losing your soul:

• Lead without micromanaging.

• Protect your early ideas.

• Build teams that challenge each other without tearing each other down.

• Trust the process—especially when it’s uncomfortable.

For creators working from Medellín or Mexico City, Berlin or Bali, this is a portable playbook. One that doesn’t rely on luck or charisma, but on thoughtful systems, emotional rigor, and shared belief.

Final Frame

Creativity, Inc. is the rare kind of book that makes you rethink how you work, lead, and build. It’s part memory, part method. A field guide for turning chaos into story—and doing it with people you trust.

Whether you’re running a creative studio, building a brand, or writing a novel from a fifth-floor walkup in Laureles, read this. Then read it again.

And remember: if your idea feels raw, uncertain, or strange…

Good.

That means you’re on the right track.

🍿 The Stream

The Studio (Apple TV+)

Legendary. Epic. Wildly inside baseball—and somehow still thrilling.

This show isn’t just about Hollywood—it’s of Hollywood. It drips with cinematic love and satire in equal measure.

The camera work alone deserves an Emmy nod: long takes that echo The Player, static shots that feel like surveillance, and then that table-level lens in the Ron Howard scene—like the camera itself is in hurry-up mode.

Gorgeous, reverent, mischievous.

But the real joy? It’s Seth Rogen and the stoner brain trust behind this world.

You know that laugh—that laugh—where someone goes, “What if Ron Howard called me a motherf*cker and we got into a fistfight?” or “What if Martin Scorsese started crying during a notes session?”

In most universes, that late-night bong riff dies on a couch. But in The Studio, they run with it. Rogan has matured his stoner philosophy into something mythic. Insane ideas that somehow work, because we believe the madness is real.

Seth Rogen, another of ATN’s spirit animals, is the perfect conduit.

A wide-eyed cinephile dropped into a world of egos and prestige, where he keeps dying—creatively and emotionally—at the hands of his heroes.

That’s the irony: the more reverent he is, the more brutal the comedy. And that’s what makes this show sing.

It’s smart. It’s mean. It’s somehow earnest.

Well done.

Cut.

🛤️ Outtro

Reinvention isn’t just about where you go—it’s about how you create.

Every place you land is a blank page. What you write there? That’s the legacy.

If this newsletter sparked something, pass it along to a friend, a fellow explorer, or anyone rewriting their life.

This community grows through real connection—one story, one share at a time.

Enjoyed This? Share It.

See you next week. Keep moving. Keep making.